


Take Entrapta Out!

by Shadsie



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Age Difference, Age Difference is addressed, Attack of the 50-foot Princess, Canon Compliant, Comedy, Crush, Drama, F/M, First Dates, Fright zone, Gen, Life in the Fright Zone, Mention of Entrapdak, Mentions of Repkyle, Nothing squicky happens, Tragicomedy, seasons 2 and 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 00:57:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21235493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadsie/pseuds/Shadsie
Summary: Kyle misinterprets Catra's orders to "Take Entrapta out!"A date ensues and from there, Kyle didn't know what he was getting into.





	Take Entrapta Out!

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: No, neither character is “aged up” or “aged down” to fit the ship. No, nothing squicky happens, the premise is a one-sided crush. Yes, the age-difference is addressed (in terms of mistaken identity). 
> 
> Trigger warnings: Heartache, mentions of bullying, including food-deprivation. Played for drama, not for laughs. 
> 
> And, yes, there is an odd video game reference in here. I want to see if anyone gets it.

**Take Entrapta Out! **

Kyle mentally questioned the order that Catra had given in her last communiqué. Meanwhile, he hid from the chaos that was going on around him. Normally, robot-fights would have been a fun thing to watch, but not when metal appendages flew overhead – too close, way too close!   
  
“Take Entrapta out!”   
  
What did Catra mean by that? She’d said that if he hadn’t heard back from her, to take Entrapta out. Kyle peered to where the scientist was struggling valiantly against her currently-homicidal latest creation. Emily was beeping madly and trying to help her to subdue the prototype.   
  
Did Catra mean for him to kill her? No, that couldn’t be it. Entrapta was the Horde’s new asset. Already, Lord Hordak himself considered her work to be valuable. Wouldn’t Catra get into great trouble for such orders? It was her prerogative as Second-in-Command to make executive decisions, but Kyle couldn’t imagine a need to kill their new crack-engineer. Perhaps it was a matter of stopping the current experiment? It was already running amok…  
  
Had she become a liability so quickly?   
  
No, Kyle decided. What Catra wanted was probably for him to subdue Entrapta in some way – in order to keep her experiment from destroying the rest of the Fright Zone… or to keep her from making any more if they were going to act like this. He could knock her unconscious with a standard-issue Horde shock-baton. Kyle did not like the prospect of this at all. First of all, he didn’t think he could get anywhere near Entrapta with her two robots going at it. Second, the girl was strong! At present, he was watching her fend off no less than hundreds of pounds of crazed metal with her limbs and hair. If she saw him coming for her, he’d likely end up being strangled in tendrils of hair or thrown across the room. Why did Catra ask such a task of him? He sighed and prepared, hoping to hear back from Catra so that he wouldn’t have to go forward with it.   
  
Also, he really didn’t want to hurt Entrapta. She had…well; he wouldn’t call it an innocence about her, but…something? She’d been pretty nice to the entire squad even if she was a bit eager to upgrade weapons and to experiment with planetary-hacking.   
  
He also had to admit that he found her quite pretty.   
  
People tended to make the mistake about Kyle that he was only attracted to one kind of person. Some of the whispers he overheard in the halls about him and Rogelio did get out of hand. They were friends – sometimes. They were a little closer to each other than that – sometimes. However, they fought sometimes, too. Occasionally, Rogelio was unreadable, or, Kyle felt, that he was easy to “leave him behind” to get in good with the rest of their squad-mates. Whenever Kyle had messed up in training the team was quick to turn on him. Rogelio tended to side with the majority. They’d separated of late because of this tendency. But it wasn’t just lizard-men or even just men in general that Kyle would find his gaze resting on.   
  
He wondered if he was just lonely – alone among a literal army.   
  
And, honestly, Entrapta should have been the last person he should start feeling any of these kinds of feelings for. He was meek and tended toward quietude. She was quite manic and honestly, a bit scary. Kyle could easily see her trying to make him a scientific test-subject. At present, he had been hastily recruited into being a research assistant and it was going… well. The boy ducked as another out of control robot-limb flailed his way. He tucked and rolled as Emily almost ran him over.   
  
He breathed in sharply and braced himself. He hadn’t heard back from Catra in the time allotted. Alright, he was going in to stop this madness---  
  
\-- And the prototype-robot quickly grabbed him by a leg. He was lifted up into the air and the room started spinning. The communication-pad clattered to the floor.   
  
Catra’s voice crackled over it, not that he caught what she was saying over his own screams.   
  
As he was being tossed around, Entrapta picked up the communication-pad and was talking to someone. Kyle’s world was spinning colors and a lurching stomach, but he thought he heard her asking “Rescued from what?”   
  
After he was finally tossed to the floor (roughly), Entrapta engaged a kill-switch on the prototype. It sparked with loose electricity and shut down immediately. She was talking to Catra over the pad. “Don’t worry, that was just a prototype. The next one will be much bigger.”   
  
Kyle let out a little squeak. He was recovering himself. _Bigger. Dear Horde…_  
  
“Oh, Kyle!” Entrapta said as she set down the pad. “Thank you so much for all your help!”  
  
“H-help?” Kyle ventured. “I…um…hardly did anything.”   
  
“Oh, nonsense!” Entrapta chimed as she vaulted past him on her hair to inspect the remains of her destroyed robot. “Thanks to you, I got a first-hand look at how the grapplers worked! Perfect! Just perfect! The rest… however…” She casually curled a tendril of hair at her chin. “I definitely need to work a little more on the brain.”   
  
Kyle nodded hastily. “Y-yeah.”   
  
“You aren’t hurt, are you?”   
  
Kyle gulped. Her eyes were inspecting him… two sparkling rubies… he shook the thought from his head. “I… I’m okay. A little bruised maybe?” 

“Oh! Stay right there! I’ve got a cream for that! Well, an experimental cream, I don’t know what the side-effects are yet.”   
  
“No-no!” Kyle said, putting up his hands. “That’s perfectly alright! I’m fine! I’m fine!” 

“Are you sure?”   
  
“Yeah.”   
  
Entrapta started cleaning up the mess she’d made. “Alright, Emily!” she ordered her pet Horde-drone, “Push that parts-box over here…”   
  
Kyle began picking up pieces, too, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulders and rump from his rough landing and the pain in his legs and ankles from being tossed around like a flail.   
  
As he watched Entrapta effortlessly lift large and heavy parts of chassis with her long hair, Kyle was struck with a strange thought. The words of Catra echoed in his mind again. “Take Entrapta out.”   
  
Could Catra have possibly meant something entirely different than violence? Okay, so it wasn’t like Catra to not recommend violence, but, perhaps her words had the meaning that she thought Entrapta had been working too hard. It probably wasn’t because she was worried about her – only that some of her experiments were getting out of hand and that a break would do her good, rest her mind. Entrapta had been staying within the confines of these dark green walls ever since she arrived here – and that’s when she wasn’t wandering around in even smaller spaces – the vent system that she liked to scuttle around in so much.   
  
Kyle twitched and swallowed a hard lump that had formed in his throat all of a sudden. “Entrapta?”  
  
“Hmm?” She regarded him with a little cock to her head.   
  
Kyle caught his breath. This was entirely too forward. What was he getting himself into? She would probably reject his offer. While she seemed lonely, she also seemed to genuinely enjoy her solitude… she wasn’t like him, not desperate for friends. Why was he even doing this? 

Then he let it out. “Would you…like to go out?”  
  
“What do you mean?”   
  
“Like… Oh! I can give you a tour of the Fright Zone! There’s more stuff than just the laboratory areas and the prisons! Or this…um… prison-area that you’ve turned into a laboratory! Maybe we can sneak into the bowling alley or the theater… I mean, you’re stuck here working all the time.”   
  
“I’d like that,” Entrapta replied. “I have been meaning to gather more data on my surroundings and an outdoor walk would be conducive to that. Consider it a date!”  
  
“D-Date?” Kyle couldn’t hide his blush. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’ll… see you later… in about three hours? I have a few duties I need to perform.”   
  
“Of course.” She smiled at him before turning to Emily. “Emily, hand me that screwdriver, the one with the red handle.”   


_________________________________________  
  
  
Kyle returned to the lab after getting himself a fresh uniform and swiping a keycard to the Force Captains’ recreational areas from Scorpia’s locker. He was lucky that he didn’t get caught, but one secret that most others didn’t know about him was that he was fairly decent at lock-picking. Scorpia was still abroad tonight and Kyle would return the item by morning. She wouldn’t miss it. He’d snuck into places he shouldn’t have been in before.   
  
When he met with Entrapta she seemed…cleaner? Her hair wasn’t covered in vent-dust. In fact, it looked a little damp. She wore the same clothing she had been wearing earlier. Come to think of it, he’d only ever seen her in one set of clothes. Was it because she’d been captured with only the clothes on her back and no one had thought to offer her anything else? Maybe she had been offered more, but she simply preferred this one set? He did not want to ask.   
  
“Alright!” she said excitedly. “Are you ready to take me around the Fright Zone?”  
  
“S-sure,” Kyle replied, smiling shyly.   
  
They walked together with Kyle showing Entrapta various walkways and outdoor areas. He pointed to various structures. “That’s Hordak’s area. No one goes there unless summoned.”   
  
“Ooh, fascinating!”   
  
“And over there…”  
  
“Oh, I know that place! Perfuma and I disabled the light tower! This place really does have an outdated wiring system. What I’ve got in Dryl is much more efficient.”   
  
“Okay…”  
  
Kyle tried to keep up as she chattered on about the various technical details of electricity and its use. He did not want to show disinterest, it was just far over his head.   
  
“Do you miss Dryl?” he asked cautiously.   
  
“Oh, yes,” Entrapta answered, “But it’s okay. I’m making so much more progress here! I’m not worried. The Crypto-Castle is automated. I left the bots on basic-routines when I left it last. I had a small staff of people, but they left to join the Rebellion – oh! But don’t worry about them, they’re just cooks. I want to see if I can contact them and see if they want to come here because Baker makes the best tiny cupcakes! Scorpia’s are… okay…”  
  
“Are the people going to be okay without you? The people of the kingdom, I mean?”  
  
“Oh, yeah. I mean, they’re going to be a part of the Horde now, right? You’ve been taking care of me so well, so I don’t think I have anything to worry about!”

Kyle gulped and tried to hide it. “Alright… do you want me to take you to the bowling alley?”   
  
“Okay! Bowling is… some kind of sport, right?”   
  
“I can show you how to play. Lower level soldiers aren’t really supposed to be in there whenever we want like the Force Captains, but we’ve sometimes have game-nights. It’s actually a lot of fun.”   
  
  
___________________________________  
  
  
Entrapta decided that she did not like bowling much. She just wasn’t getting the hang of it.  
  
Kyle showed her how with one of the more lightweight balls. He even showed her the special ones that Scorpia used that had their holes in places to accommodate her claws (she preferred a heavy make; Kyle could barely lift one of hers with both arms and his entire body). Entrapta tried balls of different weights in both a hand and her hair and settled on a mid-weight ball that felt right to her, but she kept getting gutterballs. She knocked over a couple of pins on one shot, but it wasn’t quite working!   
  
She retrieved a notebook and a pen and rapidly scribbled calculations, trying to judge trajectories. She squinted and let fly. Gutter.   
  
“Oof!” she said with a stomp of her foot. Pins wobbled at that. “This game would be much more fun if I could make some kind of awesome bowling-gun that would just shoot the ball right into them! If I could rig some kind of a catapult or missile-launcher type of thing…”   
  
“Um… Entrapta? That’s…not quite how it works.”   
  
She was already scribbling up some schematics.   
  
“Hoo, boy… Entrapta, this… this is just a game, okay? We aren’t even placing bets on it. We don’t um… need to destroy the bowling-alley… or, you know, make this into more work for you.”   
  
“Easy for you to say! You’re doing so much better than I am!”  
  
“I haven’t made a strike all night.”   
  
“You got that seven-ten split! It’s more than what I’ve got.”   
  
“Alright, then. Maybe we should just call it quits and see a movie?”   
  
“I haaaave been curious as to what kind of films are shown in the Horde, so sure!” 

  
  
_______________________________________

  
“They show these in the barracks sometimes, on holidays. Mostly we get educational stuff, how to fight, basic hygiene videos, that kind of thing.”   
  
Kyle fiddled with a projector. He made note of the last movie that was slated in its data-hold. He shrugged. It was as good as any. He worried that it might offend her in some way, but the Horde didn’t really have anything that he thought was particularly sensitive.   
  
Momentarily, he was sitting beside Entrapta in a theater seat while “The Attack of the 50-Foot Princess” began to play.   
  
Her eyes sparkled in the film-light as she took it all in. Far from being offended, she seemed to be intrigued.   
  
“Are all Horde drama-films like this?”   
  
“Pretty much,” Kyle answered with a shrug. “Princesses tend to be villains and monsters – na---not that you are! I mean… in the movies! I mean, Scorpia isn’t like this, and you aren’t like this, it’s just…”   
  
“Oh, that’s just physically impossible! She’d collapse under her own weight like a beached-whale! And growing that fast? She’d tear all of her muscles! And the bone-growth would be super-painful!”   
  
Kyle was surprised. Entrapta didn’t seem to be offended at all by the implications on the morals and status of Princesses, but by the dubious “science” used in the science fiction of the movie.   
  
She prattled on, but it became clear to him by her smile and some laughter that she was enjoying this. He started laughing too, pointing out all of the cheesy special-effects. There really wasn’t much that the Horde did for making their entertainment and it showed. All of the better effects were saved for the serious training videos.   
  
__________________________________  
  
When they parted for the night, Entrapta seemed a lot more relaxed than she had been previously. As Kyle went back to the barracks, he noticed a spring in his step. He was feeling a lot better, too. He noted that his bruises still hurt a little, but that hardly mattered anymore.   
  
In the days that followed, he became an eager research assistant. Most of the time, things didn’t explode and most of the things that exploded were just Emily, who seemed to take it in stride with every upgrade. Most of Kyle’s assistance was merely bringing satchel-loads of things to her from the scrap yard.   
  
She listened while he told her stories of growing up in the Horde. She paused in disbelief when he told her of how none of the children had toys growing up and had to make their own games out of scrap parts and rocks. She seemed to be sympathetic when he talked about his friendships being fair-weather at best, since strength was the admired trait in the Horde and he didn’t have a lot of it. It was hard to tell since she seemed to put her mask down to spot-weld at precisely those moments.   
  
“You don’t have to be hung up on failure, you know,” she said to him during one of these conversations.   
  
Kyle looked down and away. Entrapta sprang up on her hair and got close to his face. “You can’t believe the kind of data you get from it!” she told him matter-of-factly. “You learn from it and keep doing a little bit better each time you try!”   
  
“Yeah, but…” Kyle complained, “I feel like I don’t learn from it at all, and no matter what I do, even when I think I’m doing things right, I get blamed for everything.”   
  
“Ooh, so you’re the scapegoat!” she said, all too excitedly. Kyle was taken aback.   
  
“Scapegoat?”   
  
“If my studies on humanoid behavior are correct, sometimes groups develop someone to blame for their problems, even if it’s not true. Don’t worry about it. You do a lot more than what the others recognize and you’ve sure helped me a lot! I appreciate it!”   
  
Kyle felt himself blushing. His response was to run out of the laboratory as quickly as possible before Entrapta lifted her mask up enough to take notice of it. His heart was pounding from exertion. Well, he’d blame it on exertion.   
  
“Kyle? Kyle?”   
  
________________________________________

  
It was a few days later that Kyle wandered into Entrapta’s lab and promptly collapsed.   
  
“Kyle?”   
  
He heard Entrapta’s voice first and the distinct sound of his stomach growling second when he started to aweaken. He felt tendrils of hair moving over his face and gripping his shoulders. He was being examined. He seemed to be… on a couch?   
  
“You came in here and fainted. You seem to be suffering from malnutrition and exhaustion.”   
  
“Catra stole my ration bars again.   
  
“Again?”   
  
“It’s been three days. She’s been hungrier since she’s been out on field-missions and I don’t like getting beaten up, so I just give ‘em to her.”   
  
“Okay, okay! I’ve got just the thing! I’ll be back in a sec!”   
  
Kyle snoozed for he didn’t know how long. Entrapta returned with a tray of various small snacks and tiny cups of water.   
  
“For me?: Kyle asked hesitantly.  
  
“Of course, silly! I asked the commissary and they were sooo nice! One of the people there asked why I wanted extra when I’d just eaten lunch. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell them about you.”   
  
Kyle proceeded to shove small foods into his mouth as quickly as he could.  
  
“Hey there!” Entrapta exclaimed, “Pace yourself or you’re going to get sick!”  
  
Kyle obediently slowed down.   
  
“No wonder your performance in your squadron’s training-routine has been suffering.” Entrapta pulled out a graph.   
  
“You’ve been keeping graphs on us?”  
  
“Of course! Hordak is too busy to attend training sessions at all and Scorpia has so much to do, so I thought I’d be helpful.”  
  
“I haven’t seen you watching us.”   
  
Entrapta pointed to a vent with a lock of her hair.   
  
“Oh, yeah. That’s kind of creepy, you know.”  
  
“Creepy?”   
  
“Never mind.”   
  
“I’ll talk to Catra. She shouldn’t be taking food from you. It’s not good for group-dynamics and it’s not good for you as a soldier.”   
  
Kyle yelped. “Please don’t! She’ll kill me!”   
  
“Oh, she will not! She’ll listen to me. She’s my friend, at least, according to the data.”   
  
Kyle had his doubts, but he was grateful to have at least one person looking out for him right now.   
  
“I feel like my entire squadron could just leave me behind and not even care.”   
  
Entrapta firmly put her mask down and looked away.   
  
Kyle had never been clear as to how Entrapta had wound up in the Fright Zone. He thought that she had been simply captured by Catra. If he had known further details, he wouldn’t have made the statement that he did.   
  
__________________________

The internal conflict had started when Kyle asked if there was something nice he could do for her. He felt compelled to repay Entrapta’s kindness with a gift of some sort, not that there was a lot that could be scrounged up in the Fright Zone. The squadron was going abroad and he wondered if she wanted anything from the edges of the kingdom they would be posted on. She did mention that Plumeria had some plant life she’d wanted to study. If he could find the time, he’d decided he could bring her back some seeds. It was the dead of winter in the Fright Zone, but the weather in Plumeria was supposed to be in a kind of perpetual spring and summer.   
  
“Well, my birthday is coming up. My kitchen staff and my bots always tried to do something nice for me. The bots never quite got the hang of… people-presents.”   
  
“Birth-day?”   
  
“You know, the anniversary of the year you were born. When were you born?”   
  
“I don’t know,” Kyle said honestly. “I was taken into the Horde when I was really young – too young to remember my parents or anything. According to the records, I’m somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years old. Shadow Weaver never kept good records on that kind of thing. I don’t know the month or anything.”   
  
“That’s too bad. Mine’s the twenty-fourth of this month. I’m going to be twenty-nine.”   
  
“Twenty-nine?” Kyle yelped.   
  
“Yep? Is that difficult to believe?”   
  
Entrapta had her back to him, typing on a keypad.   
  
“Y-yeah, it is actually,” Kyle said, tugging at his collar.   
  
“How so?”   
  
“You seem…young? I mean, you look young.”   
  
“According to most data I have gathered on social interactions, that is something that most people take as a compliment… well, except for Princess Frosta. She doesn’t take it as a compliment.”   
  
“I am sorry if I was rude.”   
  
“Not at all.”   
  
____________________________  
  
  
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”   
  
Kyle berated himself once he got a moment alone.  
  
His heart was beating rapidly. He felt on the edge of panic. “How could I let myself? No… she’s… it’s not right!”   
  
It was all wrong now. Not only did he have a crush on a superior (for Entrapta had been made a superior science officer of the Horde. It wasn’t official on-record, but she was treated as such now), but she was in a completely different age-bracket!   
  
It’s not that age-gap relationships could not work. He’d heard about love between mortals and immortals, but he’d really thought of her as only eighteen or nineteen at most – a girl, when she was a grown woman.   
  
That was when he realized she hadn’t even looking at him the same way he’d been looking at her. Entrapta was all about her work. Kindness, perhaps, too, to the people in her immediate vicinity, but Kyle could feel that this was one-sided at best.   
  
What a fool he was. Someone shows him a modicum of nicety and he latches onto them. Like a parasite. Yeah… that’s what Shadow Weaver would have called him for this, right?   
  
He slid down a wall and hugged his knees to his chest.   
  
He’d done this with Rogelio, too.   
  
It had gotten even worse lately. Entrapta had been called to Hordak’s sanctum and was hardly spending any time in her own lab or quarters or even anywhere else around the Fright Zone anymore. They were working on something “big” that she couldn’t declassify – not that Kyle really wanted to know about it, anyway. He was an obedient soldier whose job it was to follow orders and not to ask questions.   
  
She’d said that she liked having friends. Entrapta had told him that she liked being his friend – but she’d said that she _really_ liked being friends with Hordak. She insisted that he wasn’t as scary as he seemed once one got to know him. Kyle just took Entrapta’s word on that. He knew better. Lord Hordak was…selective… in whom he treated with favor.   
  
Entrapta didn’t ask to go to the movies with him again. She never made her “awesome bowling-gun.”   
  
Kyle had lost her. He’d never had her. He’d never had a chance.   
  
Still, he’d see her in the halls sometimes. She’d smile at him. Sometimes he still brought her things.   
  
Catra had stopped bullying him for food. He never knew if it was because Entrapta had said something and she had listened to her or if it was for some other reason.   
  
Every time this happened, he was reminded that he wasn’t as useless as he thought he was. He could make her smile, and for now, that was enough.   
  
All in all, Kyle didn’t regret his decision to take Entrapta out. It hurt, but he didn’t regret it.   
  
  
________________________________  
  
**END.**


End file.
